Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Party’s Over

Nick Basham, the poster boy for everything that is wrong with pawnish Portsmouth politicians

The Party’s Over

The death yesterday of singer Andy
Williams and an article that appeared in the Portsmouth Daily Times today (9/27/2012) titled “Layoffs Possible After
State Reviews Budget Plan,” made me think of the lyrics of the popular song:

The party’s over
It’s time to call it a day
They’ve burst your pretty balloon
And taken the moon away
It’s time to wind up the masquerade
Just make your mind up the piper must be paid

Yes, the party appears to be over as far as the illegal
budgetary transfer of public funds, which the City Auditor and PDT reporter Frank Lewis continue misleadingly to
refer to as “charge-offs.” Instead of calling an illegal transfer of funds an
illegal transfer of funds, or an “unwarranted allocation,” to use the state auditor’s phrase, the city auditor has been calling it a “charge-off” to dupe the public, and the Portsmouth Daily Times has played along
with the duping, for duping helps make the party
possible. According to state statutes, monies must be used for the purposes for
which they were appropriated. Charles F. Barga, Chief
Auditor for the Athens Region, informed City Auditor Trent Williams that “Ohio Revised Code Section 5705.10(H) states
that monies paid into a fund must be used only for the purposes for which such
fund has been established.” Barga, incidentally, is a Certified Public Accountant. Portsmouth
City Auditor Williams is not.

What the city government has
been illegally doing for years is partying on public money, using funds that were
appropriated for roads, sewers, public
buildings, etc., using those largely for salariesand benefits for themselves and other city employees. To stay in office,
Portsmouth politicians have been buying off public employees by illegallytransferring funds. Most of our elected and unelected office holders are
the bankrupt pawns of local plutocrats. The denigrated Municipal Building, a photo of which
accompanied the Times article, is a dingy monument to “charge-offs,” that is to illegal
budgetary transfers. Instead of maintaining the building, the politicians for a long time have been neglecting it.
The city council recently appropriated some
six thousand dollars for engineers to make yet another study of whether or not
the building is a hopeless wreck. If it is, it is a result more than anything of
“charge-offs” and recurring costs of these engineering
studies of the building’s structure.

Party Pooper

The party pooper, the person
who helped bring the illegal transfer of funds to the attention of the public and state officials, is former
mayor Jane Murray. Because she would not party along with the boys, because she
was not a party girl, she was vilified as a witch and recalled from office. Any
elected official who shows signs of fiscal sanity, and doesn’t indulge in the “charge-off”
double talk, is labeled as a head case or
malcontent and is soon out of office.
Bob Mollette, who I believe may have been the most conscientious and capable
city council member in the last half century, was replaced by one of the most unqualified
council members in the last half century, Nick Basham, an obstreperous, bumptious,
arrested adolescent who was known for throwing chairs around when he was a temper
tantrum teacher and later served as the taunter-in-chief of Mayor Murray when she was
in office. Now he is a budget basher. “It really bothers me as a
local elected official that first we had one plan of CIP money a local judge
didn’t find palatable,” Basham is quoted in the PDT article as saying. “So we came up
with another plan, and we thought this out. We worked the budget out. We came
up with numbers that within years we could be back at least to a level. And now
it’s almost like having the rug pulled out from under you. It’s the state
telling the local government basically what you can and can’t do and at the
same time telling us we can’t have a deficit. So what if we just don’t do
anything with this? If we leave it the way it is, what is the State Auditor
going to do?” Instead of chairs, Basham is now throwing budgets around. How dare anyone tell us we can’t continue to do charge-offs and run deficits!

What Basham reflects is the deeply rooted distrust and dislike of
outsiders and the defiance of authority that is ingrained in hill culture. Steve
Hayes on WNXT and Frank Lewis on the PDT help fan this incestuous Appalachian paranoia,
a paranoia that our local plutocrats profit from. They don’t want anyone restricting
them in their greedy accumulation of millions. Just as states’ rights were used historically
to perpetuate slavery, the city charter has been used to perpetuate “charge-offs” and
corruption. Budget basher Basham is the poster boy for everything that is wrong
with pawnish Portsmouth politicians, and he is the best argument for getting rid of the
city charter. He’s no longer throwing half-price drink parties for disgruntled city employees in his bar, but he continues to act as if the drinks are on the taxpayers. The party’s over my paunchy friend and the piper must be paid.

Followers

About Me

Retired now, I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, hold B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Wesleyan U. (Conn.) and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, where I was a Research Associate at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies and a coordinator of a committee that organized international American Studies conferences during the American Bicentennial. From 1989-2006, I taught English at Shawnee State U., in Portsmouth, Ohio, where I was active in the faculty union, the Shawnee Education Association, serving four terms as president. I also served as faculty advisor to the student gay and lesbian group. I have served also as president of the Concerned Citizens of Portmouth and Scioto County, a community action group.
My scholarly interests have focused on the American Dream: the Myth and the Realities.
I can be reached at rforr1@roadrunner.com
A selection of my poems can be found at http://xpalidosis.blogspot.com The original contents of all blogs on this site are copyrighted @.